For the past few weeks i am working on enhancing my VMware home lab setup to be more scalable and enterprise grade , which gave me an opportunity to migrate the embededd PSC to external to extend my vCenter Single Sign-On domain with more vCenter Server instances to support multi site NSX and SRM use cases, you can reconfigure and repoint the existing vCenter Server instance to an external Platform Services Controller.

Few things to note before starting the migration :

The process is relatively straightforwad but remember there is no coming back once you migrate the embedded PSC to external .

Make Sure to take the snapshot of vCenter Server , in case anything gone wrong during the migration you can revert back vCenter to the last working state

Non Ephemeral virtual port groups are not supported by the PSC , as a workaround we need to create a new Ephemeral port group in the same VLAN (if using VLANs) as vCenter server network for the sake of deployment of new PSC . You can migrate the PSC network to non ephemeral port group after the migration completes successfully .

This is what I am running in my lab currently , a vCenter server appliance with embedded PSC:

I want to achieve the below topology with External PSC:

Lets start this by installing the external Platform Services Controller instance as a replication partner of the existing embedded Platform Services Controller instance in the same vCenter Single Sign-On site.

Mount the VCSA ISO and start the installation .

Enter the credentials of the ESXi host where you are planning to deploy the PSC appliance.

Acceppt the self sigh certificate .

Here select “Install Platform Service Controller” .

Select Join an SSO domain in an existing vCenetr PSC:

Join the exsiting site and select the SSO site name:

As I have explained before e, if you have not created a Ephemeral virtual port group you will not be able to select a network to deploy the new PSC.

Go back to vCenter and create a Distributed port group with Ephemeral port binding which will be used for the PSC Deployment.

Enter the standard networking parameters and complete the deployment wizard.

Click on finish and wait for the deployment completion . This process will take approx: 8-10 minutes.

You will get the below screen once PSC deployed successfully.

Now , Log in to the vCenter Server instance with an embedded Platform Services Controller.Verify that all Platform Services Controller services are running by executing the below command:

service-control –status –all

The final step is to run the below command to repoint the embedded PSC to new deployed external PSC: